I have no idea what Arch BSD is trying to do. If it's just the BSD kernel included, it seems like some sort of ricer thing to me; just yet another kernel to boot. If it's the whole BSD base system and userland, it's basically a linux-ported BSD with pacman and the ABS. I guess if you really wanted the FreeBSD coreutils as opposed to the GNU ones but you couldn't bear to part with your rolling release for other stuff, it could be useful.

That's all fine, but you can't pretend that FreeBSD and Arch Linux are philosophically aligned at all. Completely different goals. Not even close. ArchBSD is kind of a bastard child...

AFAIK, it's been possible to hack a BSD kernel into an Arch install for quite a while. As long as I've been using it.

If you want bsd just run bsd. Why would you put up with all the hassles of running a Frankenstein system like that? Especially as systemd/Dbus/consolekit which many desktop elements are being built on are not cross compatible with a bsd kernel. I don't see how the userland programs are going to much different with a freebsd kernel? (There are some exceptions but is it worth it?)

This is actually pretty cool. I spend 10 hours /day with my arch boxes and I want to update for 5 minutes per day and never do a distro-upgrade. I've wanted something like this for BSD. I actually might try this out.

FreeBSD already has an extensive ports collection, and a system for fetching and building them. Indeed, if you want the BSD kernel, it's probably best to just run BSD. I also recall from my BSD days that there was a linux binary emulator package so that you could run Linux binaries - not sure if that's still maintained or used, but I don't see why it wouldn't be.

It's the only init system in the official repo, as it's the only one the arch developers care about or are working on. You can use another init system, in theory, but you're going to be writing a lot of custom scripts.

FreeBSD has Ports (which AUR and Portage were inspired by), some of the best documentation on the web, and a much bigger following than you think. The only thing it doesn't have comparable to Arch is a rolling binary release.